Masters and Lords: Mid-19th-Century U.S. Planters and Prussian JunkersAmong the regional landed elites in the Western World of the mid-1800s, the two most formidable were the owners of slave plantations in the Southern states of the U.S. and the proprietors of manorial estates in the provinces of Prussian East Elbia. Masters and Lords surveys the economic, social, and political histories of the two classes from the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries respectively, and pays particular attention to planters during the secession crisis of 1860-61 and to Junkers during the revolutionary crisis of 1848-49. In the process, Bowman grapples with such ambiguous and contentious concepts as capitalism, conservatism, and paternalism. Despite very different labor systems, antebellum planters and contemporaneous Junkers alike presided over landed estates that functioned as both autocratic political communities and agricultural enterprises exporting valuable commodities to industrializing England. This book also highlights important geographic, demographic, and political contrasts between the South and East Elbia as regional societies. Bowman concludes that the crucial distinction between the two landed elites is to be found in the Junkers' militarist and estatist monarchism versus the planters' libertarian but racist republicanism. |
Contents
| 3 | |
| 17 | |
2 Agrarian Entrepreneurs | 42 |
3 Contentious Concepts | 79 |
4 Planter Republicanism versus Junker Monarchism | 112 |
5 Patriarchy and Paternalism | 162 |
6 Planter and Junker Conservatism | 184 |
Epilogue | 217 |
Notes | 225 |
Index | 349 |
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Masters & Lords: Mid-19th-Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers Shearer Davis Bowman Limited preview - 1993 |
Common terms and phrases
acres agrarian agricultural American antebellum antebellum planters aristocracy Assembly Baton Rouge Berdahl Berlin Brandenburg bureaucracy Burke capitalism capitalist Chapel Hill Civil conservatism conservative constituted corporatist cotton County democratic Deutsche East Elbia economic Edmund Ruffin England English essay Europe farms feudal Friedrich Wilhelm Friedrich Wilhelm IV Genovese German Geschichte historian History Ideology industrial institution James James Henry Hammond Jefferson John Junkerdom knight's estates Konservatismus Kreuzzeitung labor landed elites Landwirtschaft Louisiana State Univ Ludwig Max Weber Mississippi modern monarchy Negro nineteenth century nobility North Carolina Old Prussian Old South Oxford Univ paternalism paternalistic patriarchal peasants percent plantation planter elite planters and Junkers political population Preussen preussischen Princeton proslavery provinces Prussian road republican Revolution Rittergut owners rural secession serfdom servants sharecropping slaveholders slavery slaves social society Southern Texas tobacco trans U.S. South Unfree Labor Virginia William World York
Popular passages
Page 86 - The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, ie the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
Page 85 - And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.
Page 145 - The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature ; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically.
Page 116 - That a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free State; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided, as dangerous to liberty ; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.
Page 100 - Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of largescale industry.
Page 4 - Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.
Page 145 - Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man ; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural condition.
Page 143 - I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way.